This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind’s relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation. Nishan Degnarain is an economist with a strong background in both the public and private sectors. He co-leads the World Economic Forum’s Special Initiative on Oceans together with Greg Stone. Since 2013, Nishan has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Oceans. Greg Stone is Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist for Oceans at Conservation International (CI). He has given a TED talk and lectured throughout the world. Greg is widely published in scientific literature, National Geographic Magazine, and authored three award-winning books, including Underwater Eden . Soul of the Sea In the Age of the Algorithm By Nishan Degnarain, Greg Stone, Jane Crosen Leete's Island Books Copyright © 2017 Gregory S. Stone and Nishan Degnarain All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-918172-62-4 Contents FOREWORD by Ambassador Peter Thomson, President of the UN General Assembly, PREFACE, INTRODUCTION, OUR OCEAN CIVILISATION, 1 Pushing the Boundary, 2 Life-Support System Diagnosis: Declining Ocean Health, 3 Oceans in the Industrial Age, 4 Knights in Shining Armour, 5 Teetering on the Edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, A VISION FOR OUR OCEAN, 6 New Values for a New Revolution, 7 Ocean Innovation Springboards, 8 No Chance of Zero Risk, THE LEADERSHIP MOMENT, 9 Systems Acupuncture, 10 An Ocean Renaissance, EXHIBITS, EPILOGUE, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, BIBLIOGRAPHY, CHAPTER 1 One planet, one experiment. — Edward O. Wilson The Diversity of Life Pushing the Boundary ANY SYSTEM — biological, financial, mechanical, or digital — has safe operating limits. The trouble is that without an operating manual we don't know where precisely these limits are when it comes to Spaceship Earth. We do, however, know that we're exceeding several already. We also know that, even within these limits or planetary boundaries, there are tipping points. Past these points, things begin to go swiftly, irreversibly, unpredictably, dangerously, and even fatally wrong. Our momentum can then carry us clean through the boundaries and leave us stranded on the other side. These boundaries and tipping points apply wherever we look to our global commons, a phrase used to refer to shared resources over which no individual or state has sovereignty such as fresh water, air, biodiversity, and, of course, the ocean. As wonderful as this shared heritage and legacy might sound, we have thus far been slow to protect and preserve our commons. Most of the global governance institutions designed to do this are struggling. They need to be rethought, restructured, reorganised, and retooled. Luckily, the extraordinary age in which we're living — this Fourth Industrial Revolution of ours — offers ways of safeguarding our commons for future generations. Back in 1798, the economist Thomas Malthus first proposed his famous theory of population and growth. In essence, he argued that human populations have the potential to grow exponentially (the rate at which they grow accelerates), whilst the rate at which food production increases stays the same (the rate is linear). When a population begins to outgrow its ability to feed itself, it is automatically checked — and brutally so. Besides the differing growth rates of population and food production posited by Malthus, we have a more obvious problem. Even if the latter could keep up with the former, how could it do so indefinitely? What's more, the problem presented by our burgeoning population is further compounded by that population's lifestyle. Even though the growth rate is slowing and birth rates are starting to level off globally, the proportion of the global population living carbon-heavy lives of bourgeois domesticity and consumption is increasing. This is the trade-off at the heart of the ideological conflict between, on the one hand Malthus and his belief in natural limits to growth, and on the other, economists such as Adam Smith (1776) and David Ricardo (1817) whose work on labour specialisation, free trade, and comparative advantage describe a world of unfettered economic growth and innovation, limited not by natural resources but by human ingenuity. Human ingenuity, they argued, was not a scarce resource — until we s